Suicide Prevention For Students at SAIT

Mental illness such as depression and anxiety has been an issue ever since social media has been taking over teenagers’ lives the past few years. There are many students who struggle with mental health and it avoids them from focusing on their schoolwork and many of the occasions can bring them to attempt suicide.

Suicide Prevention helps students whom suffer from these types of mental disabilities to advance and help them get better at it, but at the same time, it teaches them how to take care of themselves.

There were over a hundred journalism students at the presentation and there were four guest speakers which were:

- Lois Hayward, a supervisor at the Student Development and Counselling at SAIT.

- Amy Price, a Communications Assistant.

- Mara Grunau, an Executive Director at the Centre for Suicide Prevention.

“It’s not about student counselling, it’s about your mental health and everyone has mental health,” stated Hayward. Hayward also explained that a lot of the times, negative things can happen in people’s lives and she explained that even her mental health herself can be “in the toilet, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that something is wrong with you.”

Lois explained that it is important to not wait until things get worse, if someone is feeling concerned about their mental health no matter how good or how bad it is, they should take action right away. “Normally people take action when their mental health has worsened up, and this when it gets difficult to treat it, this is why it is important to do something about it when there are signs that you are not okay.”

Amy Price graduated from SAIT as a journalism student and is now a Communications Assistant at the Canadian Mental Health Association. She herself had struggled with mental health and was diagnosed with depression and anxiety when she was in high school.

Price believes that it is important to help people with mental illnesses and that as journalists if we are reporting about someone who suffers with depression or anxiety, we should also try and help them by talking to them or writing something in our story that can give advice to them.

“It’s really important that as a journalist, you should focus on what you write because you want to encourage people that there is help and that there are resources,” Hayward explains, “when using resources, you should also use strength base which can be a positive thing.”

Talking to people who are having suicidal thoughts can sometimes be hard but this is why someone who is trying to help these people, have to be careful with how they speak to them. It is important to help them get through their illnesses without making them feel like what they have in their mind is bad.

There are many reasons why people die from suicide, and anyone can have suicidal thoughts but dying from suicide is rare. “Suicide doesn’t choose, it cuts across democratic, it cuts across ages, races, nationalities, and life experiences,” Mara Grunau stated.

Journalists’ mission is not to normalize suicide, it is about making awareness to people that this is something that is happening around the world and that it is a problem. Grunau says that it is important to look at who journalists write about and what the story is about because the person will most likely read it.